10th Baltic Triennial

As far as I know, this is the first time that a debt collection agency has been quoted by the organizers of an exhibition. Outlining their ideas for the X Baltic Triennial, curators Ann Demeester, Director of de Appel in Amsterdam, and Kestutis Kuizinas, Director of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius, described how, in January 2009, Lithuanian debt collectors employed the services of a clairvoyant to track down debtors and ‘identify crooks’. ‘There are cases’, the agency declared, ‘when unconventional means and methods must be applied’ – advice which the curators took to heart. Desperate times demand desperate measures and these are indeed dark days for Lithuania: its economy, the hardest hit in the EU, is in meltdown and unemployment is escalating. However, considering the horrors that plagued (and, at times, were perpetuated by) the country for much of the 20th century – invasion, occupation, genocide, fascism and communism – Lithuania will no doubt take economic strife in its long-suffering stride.

When I visited Vilnius, though, it was hard to tell that anything was amiss. The city had been declared European Capital of Culture 2009 (along with Linz in Austria), and its centre – where the CAC, the main Triennial venue, is located – is an area of cobbled streets and gleaming churches. Who would guess that this is the centre of the old Jewish quarter, where 94 percent of the Jewish population – which, in 1939, comprised almost half the city’s inhabitants – was murdered during World War II by Germans and local fascists? No one, unless they were told. There is no memorial to this atrocity and, bizarrely, it’s not even mentioned in the city’s Museum of Genocide, which devotes itself to the Russian occupation; by the time the Russians had arrived, there were very few Jews left.

Obviously, Vilnius’ history lends itself to infinite interpretations. Recognizing this, the curators invited participating artists to create ‘new complex narratives’ inspired by the city but, rather curiously, requested that they ‘leave the habitual and established representations of Vilnius behind’ – although, given the range of ideologies that have taken hold of the country, it’s hard to believe that any single ‘habitual’ or ‘established’ representation of the place actually exists. Not all of the work in the Triennial, however, was created specifically for it; much of it was selected to reflect the show’s premise. The result was two exhibitions, both of which went under the umbrella of ‘Urban Stories’: ‘Black Swans, True Tales and Private Truths’, curated by Demeester and Kuizinas at the CAC (which included around 40 artists and collectives) and ‘Vilnius COOP: Gaps, Fictions and Practices’, curated by Leipzig-based Vera Lauf and Vilnius-based Ula Tornau (which comprised 15 artists and was held in a crumbling building located on Gediminas Avenue).

The title of the CAC section was inspired by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 2007 book The Black Swan, which employs the bird as a metaphor for ‘high-impact, hard-to-predict and rare events beyond the realm of normal expectations’ – a description of good art anywhere. As a catch-all, the idea of creating a show around ‘true tales and private truths’ made sense: Vilnius is a city where truth, far from being an absolute, has been an ideological tool used to carve whatever shapes were deemed appropriate at a given moment. Disappointingly, though, like an anthology of short stories of wildly varying quality, the resulting show was uneven and often confusing – although occasionally lit up by moments of brilliance.

I’ll start with the positives. Lithuanian artist, Deimantas Narkevicˇius’ extraordinary work Whatever you play, it sounds like the 1940s (2009), is an audio-system made from myriad radio and record-player components manufactured in Nazi Germany. Visitors were asked to bring records along and play them. It was a simple, chilling gesture (around 750,000 Lithuanians died in World War II) and one that recalled Hannah Arendt’s description of the ‘banality of evil’ – that seemingly ordinary people, the kind who might have enjoyed putting their feet up and listening to music, could also be comfortable perpetuating unthinkable atrocities. Also framing history within the context of the everyday, Latvian artist Edmunds Jansons’ wonderful animation, Little Bird’s Diary (2007), is based on drawings taken from the journal of a Latvian woman, Irina Pilke, describing her daily life from the end of World War II until the 1980s. Similarly, the images of Vilnius taken in the 1960s by veteran Lithuanian photographer Algimantas Kuncˇius focus on the details of street life, and are compelling in their acute observations of ordinary drama.

Many of the artists in the show are, understandably, concerned with the societal changes effected since the end of communism: in 1991, Lithuania was the first republic to cede from the Soviet Union and the relationship of the Baltic states to their former occupier remains fraught. Thus, much of the work in the show focused on the material remnants of totalitarianism: public sculpture and architecture. For example, a local artist group, The Second Royal Palace, is named after a model of a royal palace; although the original was destroyed in the 18th century, it is currently being rebuilt in Vilnius. The group’s installation included images and documentation of the town’s collective longing for a non-existent, prelapsarian past symbolized in the building. Also opening up debates about the role of the past in fashioning the future, Estonian artist Kristina Norman’s powerful installation After-War (2009) documented her replacement of the Monument to the Forgotten Soviet Soldier in Tallin, Estonia, (which had been relocated to a Russian cemetery) with a polished golden version, which was itself relocated to a gallery where it was suspended mid-air like a glittering ghost. The exhibition also included a fascinating film programme exploring the meaning of place – highlights were Beatrice Gibson’s A Necessary Music (2008), Akvile Anglickaite˙’s Tinside Lido (2006) and Quirine Racké and Helena Musken’s Celebration (2005).

However, despite these individual strengths, overall the exhibition at the CAC was frustratingly incoherent. As a reflection of the economic crisis, which had resulted in the Triennial budget being cut by 15 percent, the gallery spaces were shaped like a sort of compressed labyrinth – a clunky, claustrophobic metaphor that made navigation difficult and sound control almost impossible. Music and voices from seemingly countless noisy videos (overwhelmingly the medium of choice) saturated the space and rendered it faintly nightmarish. While some works were crammed into corridors or screened on tiny monitors, other weaker works were given an enormous amount of room. For example, Black of Death (above 109, Shibuya, Tokyo) (2007), a rather silly film about using stuffed crows to attract live ones by Japanese collective Chim↑Pom, was projected in one of the largest central spaces, as was Cora Roorda van Eijsinga’s pseudo-spooky video installation, Sentimental Powers Might Help You Now (2008), which appropriated scenes from various films employing ‘the power of premonitions and strange vibrations’. (Can we please have a moratorium on using footage from great films to make a trite point?) Some artists came up with woeful simplifications in response to the curatorial remit: Dutch artist Kevin van Brak’s horribly misguided attempt to cast light on Lithuanian fascism, Books for Burning (2009) – a working oven for burning Russian books – is a case in point.

One of the Triennial’s most serious problems was that much of the work in the show – especially by artists from former communist states – was inspired by real events and intricate backstories, information which visitors had no access to: without a clear framework, culturally specific meaning was lost. This strikes me as a fundamental confusion in an understanding of the role of fiction – imagine, say, if Leo Tolstoy had published War and Peace (1869) without an analysis of the French invasion of Russia. Moldovan artist Pavel Braila’s large-scale installation Chronology of the Failure (2009), for instance, included two films of a burning train as well as video monitors of enigmatic film clips. I discovered from one of the curators that Braila himself had directed a feature film that was left unfinished because, during the shoot, a train had caught fire and literally burnt up the budget; the extra clips were of similarly failed films – yet, none of this was made clear.

All of these problems were equally endemic at ‘Vilnius COOP: Gaps, Fictions and Practices’, which was more like an obituary than a group of short stories; everything, even the dusty light, seemed touched by death. The star attraction (if that’s the expression) was the venue itself: a grim, semi-derelict 1930s building. Its lifeless interior was left largely untouched by the curators, who placed pieces of uneven quality – with often mystifying connections to one another – in dark corners or stuck on grubby walls; despite the inclusion of work by good artists – in particular, Dorit Margeiter, Maya Schweizer, Clemens von Wedemeyer and Indre Klimaite – the mood was one of unremitting gloom. The exhibition was accompanied by a convoluted curatorial statement that I have no space to quote here but could, as a friend noted, be summed up thus: ‘This polyglot city is a unique hotchpotch.’ It’s not a bad idea for a novel. Why, then, compose an elegy?